Whereas in Sydney there is always the light pollution and the quite frequent sound of mostly ambulance sirens that wailed above the constant low murmur of traffic , the country night sky was full of stars , and the only traffic sound was the very occasional car rattling along the gravelled ridge road about forty meters from the house .

Not that the night was silent , by any manner of means .

There was always a time of silence at twilight , after the evening chorus of the birds had ended , but then there began those mostly slight but penetrating noises , some easily recognisable , others mysterious or intriguing .

Frogs sang their serenades down by the dam , different kinds making pleasant counterpoints.

The loudest noise came when the big ironbark eucalypt just below the house was in flower . There would come the loud whooshing of leather wings and the guttural shrieks of the fruit bats as they crashed through the leaves and sought the nectar from the flowers . It was always a surprise to me that , though they are regarded as a nuisance in commercial orchards , they did not seem to damage my fruit or nut trees. The commotion did not ever last long and then they flapped away , seeking trees further down in the gullies .

Their raucousness was in great contrast to silent flight of the tiny bentwing bats that now and then took up residence in the big blinds that sheltered the front of the house . It seemed that the family of five would now and then move between our house and a neighbour's across the road and down another gulley .

In the early evening a Coucal Pheasant also made its presence known with its booming call .

Over by the big double garage was another gumtree , apparently a favourite perch for two kinds of birds , which for years I had known by name only , having rarely come across them . In the past I had heard the boobook owl often enough , with its strange call of more pork from which it got its nickname of Mopoke . It was this characteristic that had in the past led me to confuse it with the Frogmouth , which is also called a Mopoke . I finally caught on that the strange ooom ooom sound coming from the thick bush below the house was a Frogmouth , and at last I managed to find one when I sneaked out with a powerful torch and pinpointed it . Of course , it immediately assumed its I am not a bird I am a dead branch position , quite an effective camouflage , but its eyes gave it way .

Almost at the same time I pinpointed two ring tailed possums . They were at times great trampers and stompers over the metal roof of the house , though they never got into the rafters . They are lovely creatures but unfortunately sometimes a pest . I had to share my fruit trees with them . At the house I simply ignored them , but one night there seemed to be a change of rhythm in the roof noise , Rather than a skittering scrabble , there was an irregular ker-plunk kerplunk , so taking the torch I moved out onto the higher area above the house and by its beam found that an extremely large frog had decided to hop slowly across the roof.

Human noise was rare , but one night , quite late , I heard the sound of a block and chain being used. Wondering why anyone would want to operate them fairly late at night , I walked across towards the neighour's top paddock fence. It was an apiarist who was using the tackle to lift his hives into his truck , He was running late in his shifting of them from the blossom laden block to another , richer source of nectar .

On the way back I dispensed with the torchlight , and was rewarded with a strange sight . I wondered what was the tiny almost electric blue light bobbing up and down among the trees below the orchard , and though I cannot be sure , I think that it must have been my one and only sighting of a firefly -- for some reason a single one .

The nights were dark and velvety , with the Milky Way and the Southern Cross almost giving enough light to bushwalk by . And that lack of light pollution made it a lot easier to locate Halley's Comet and any others hard to see in Sydney . Satellites were simple to find , and the various shooting stars were not only visible , but seemed almost audible . The only human made light could be seen through the trees and kilometers away across the valley , when the odd car moved through the mountain road there.

They were nights of peace and relaxation after a tiring but pleasant day working the block

I did once have a horse that arrived overnightand stayed as a visitor for about six weeks , but that is another story .